On Fri, Sep 25, 1998 at 11:25:04AM -0700, Bill Studenmund wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Sep 1998, Todd Whitesel wrote:
> 
> > But I was wondering, just how easy is it to use a non-'a' partition as
> > your root disk? Does the presence of a real 'a' partition confuse findroot?
> > Do I have to hardwire the kernel to the other partition?
> 
> I don't think it's bery easy. But as (I think it was Todd V.) pointed out,
> you can have an old-style and a new style mrb partition. Within each of
> those, you can have different "a" partitions. In fact, you could even
> share some partions between them (not root and usr, of course, but
> certainly home, etc).

  The original post mentioned this was for an i386 box.  Under
i386, NetBSD usually uses its own bootblocks at some portion of the
booting process (after the handoff from the BIOS or other boot
manager like OS-BS), and prints that message about "Use hd1a to
boot sd0a if wd0a is also installed" (or something like that).  At
the prompt, you can type something like:

wd(0,h)/netbsd

to boot off of your wd0h partition using the kernel /netbsd.  I
think this is what you want, right?  The root partition on wd0h
needs to have "/dev/wd0h / ..." in its /etc/fstab, etc.  But
other than that, it works.  Great for disaster recovery.

  I am not familiar with other archs, but have been informed that
several of them do not have this same kind of functionality.  YMMV!

  Brian
-- 
"So what's so good about that?" -- Dr. Grotowski, Math 102 prof.